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The Social Innovation Camp organisers have now announced the six projects that will be developed collaborative April 4-6. Is that where the buzz will be about social media in UK nonprofits? And if so, what happens after the camp? First, here's the projects:

All very promising, but just as interesting are some of the other ideas mentioned in their post, and the notion of the Camp as a way of catalysing continuing innovation:

We had lots of suggestions for ways to better map and coordinate the voluntary and charity sector online which would tackle some of the big problems that existing organizations face: overlapping purpose; incomplete knowledge of others in the field; identification of sources of social need; lack of transparency and so forth. There were a number of suggestions for social networking for social organizations and web 2.0 tool kits. Some nice examples include Arjen Mulder’s COOpen.net, a social networking platform for international development organizations, and Andy Gibson’s Partner Up, which is designed to encourage the sharing of best practice and collaboration to help organizations get far more done with fewer resources. David Munir Nabti, Jessica Dheere, Patricia Nabti and Hala Makarem submitted a similar idea tailored specifically for the Lebanese third sector.

We’re hoping that many of the ideas which have come to the surface through this process will be given a home elsewhere. Even if we weren’t able to develop your idea further, please feel free to keep using our website to continue to discuss them. And if the event in April is successful, why not borrow our format, learn from our mistakes and set up your own Social Innovation Camp?

Now I guess we'll need some camp follower tracking to keep in touch. The Social Innovation Camp is in some ways an alternative to the idea for a UK Netsquared initiative discussed at the Newman Arms last year. Some people wanted to focus on supporting existing nonprofits, other were more in line with Dan McQuillan's assertion that Charities are broken, and the best route forward is through more disruptive innovations.
What happens after the Camp? I'm sure, with that number of innovative thinkers in one place, ideas will flow.

Clay Shirky gave a great presentation today on his book Here Comes Everybody. I was sitting in the second row of the RSA Great Room, so shot some video. The RSA will be putting the pro version up on its site sometime in the future ... but I know a number of people who were keen to hear Clay couldn't make it, so here's a taste.
Clay spent the first part of his talk giving three examples filling out what he says in the book:

Everywhere you look, groups of people are coming together to share with one another, work together, or take some kind of public action. For the first time in history, we have tools that truly allow for this.
In the same way the printing press amplified the individual mind and the telephone amplified two-way conversation, now a host of new tools, from instant messages and mobile phones to weblogs and wikis, amplify group communication. And because we are natively good at working in groups, this amplification of group effort will change more than business models: it will change society.

The examples were of students organising through Facebook against the bank HSBC when it withdrew a free overdraft offer; young people in Belarus organising an ice-cream social in a square where gatherings were banned; Sicilian businesses organising online against the Mafia.
After the examples Clay provided some analysis, which is what I've captured in the video. He started by assuring us he wasn't going to promise a post-hierarchical paradise in which organiastions wither away; that story had been around for 10 years ... with a constant promise that it would happen sometime. Rather we are at the beginning of experimenting with the way that power shifts because of the ability of goups to communicate, and then to come together to take action. There's a 40 minute video here from a talk Clay gave at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society.

We now have a set of well-shot and edited reflections from the Circuit Rider conference, thanks to Marc Osten whose session opening session I videod here. I grabbed some observations wandering about the session - Marc was later able to interview people on the challenges they found introducing Web 2.0 technology into voluntary and community organisations and building online community.
Marc posted the video on his site, then emailed me the code from YouTube so I could embed it up here if I wished. Thanks Marc.

About the same time I spotted a "shout" (short message) posted by Matthew Edmonson to the UnLtdWorld site pointing to a post on his site embedding a video I had taken of him.

This sort of sharing, and adding value, is possible if we agree to the principle of building on each other's work, ideally adding a Creative Commons license to make that clear.
There is is nothing very fancy in what has happened here - at least to those familar with the way that we can use Web 2.0 technology if we apply open collaborative principles. I could go on with more tools and examples ... but don't need to because Paul Caplan has just written an excellent free Social Media Guide for the Media Trust which you can download from here. Free. Thanks Paul.
I'm telling the story of the videos because one of the main problems people at the conference said they had was explaining to others the benefits of using Web 2.0, and the philosophies that go with it. It's one thing to point to great examples from the US - where they are rather ahead of us in adoption - but it is much more convincing when it is close to home, you experience it first hand and can show your colleagues and clients.
It may help when next time a group says "we need a fancy new site". Circuit Riders can explain that these days the network is the site, and they are demonstrating that.

An idea is set in motion by being shared. The scope available to use for pooling, exchanging and developing ideas determines the extent of our innovation and creativity and so fundamentally our prosperity, well-being and hope for the future. Ideas grow by being articulated, tested, refined, borrowed, amended, adapted and extended, activities that can rarely take place entirely in the head of an individual; but which invariably they involve many people sharing different insights and criticisms. The web allows shared creativity of this kind to involve more people, discussing more questions from more angles with more ideas in play, at least it does as long as people organise themselves in the right way. We have only just started to explore how we could apply this collaborative, participative culture to social challenges.

Charlie started his contribution with a wry reflection on his failure to engage his 12-year-old son with a YouTube video he made. Here's the video:

The surprise of the evening came from Andrew Keen, who has been a fierce critic of Web 2.0 in his book Cult of the Amateur. He is billed as "the antichrist of Silicon Valley" and in 2006 he claimed:

... we are teetering on the edge of catastrophe. Blogs, wikis and social networking are, indeed, assaulting our economy, our culture and our values. Web 2.0 is pushing us back into the Dark Ages.

In the book he argues that the Internet is killing our culture, and threatens our traditional media. He told Times Online last year:

In a world without newspapers, publishing houses, film studios, radio and TV stations there’ll be nobody to discover and – no less important – to nurture talent. The result could be no less catastrophic than Pol Pot’s decision to eliminate talent and expertise in Cambodia by mass execution.
“Once dismantled, I fear that this professional media – with its rich ecosystem of writers, editors, agents, talent scouts, journalists, publishers, musicians, reporters and actors – can never again be put back together. We destroy it at our peril,” says Keen.

Last night Andrew's line was rather different. He called the book great, and a grand narrative, as you can see here:

While Web 2.0 has its faults, Andrew was hopeful, even optimistic, that in the future the professionals will reclaim their traditional territory.

The reality is that web 3.0 is actually going to be a moment when the experts, professionals, grab back the levers of power, the tools of creativity. When I wrote my book I was fearful that the masses were taking over and the future of the world was wikipedia. I actually think that the future of the world are professionals, doctors, academics, even politicians who will use the tools of the Internet like anybody else to distribute their wisdom and exertise. So I'm actually much less pessimistic in the way I look at the world about the future.

Perhaps this was not wholly in contradiction of Andrew's previous views, where he emphasised the role of the individual in innovation - rather than the group "we" of Charlie's book. He is now more confident of the capacity of professionals to stand out from the "amateur" online crowd.

The whole event was very friendly, and doubly useful as an opportunity to meet some of the people who had contributed to the wiki where Charlie developed the book collaboratively. Nothing like a good NESTA reception to make some potentially collaborative connections, as I previously found here.
You can download the first three chapters, see the first draft, and more background, on the book site.
Update: On the NESTA Connect blog Roland Harwood has provided a summary of Charlie and Adrew's different perspective and this insight:

The most interesting part of the discussion for me was that the web, a platform that lends itself to sharing and arguably the 1960s greatest legacy, is now the platform for modern commerce which is based on individual ownership and competition. So the key challenge will be how will big organisations, whether private or public, will adapt to this collaborative world? Interestingly the debate around the impact of the web in the US tends to be mostly focussed upon the economics, but the debate last night focussed as much on the social and political implications. The consensus from both speakers was that organisations are critical and require a core engine that makes the rules and combines both top down and bottom up solutions.

If you want to help people understand each other and collaborate for change you may need some "thingies" as I wrote the other day - social events, games and simulations, online spaces, co-ordinators. Somehow I left off the role of stories, perhaps because I didn't have in mind how they could lead to action.
Then last Friday I met up with Louise Harris and Christine Wilson, at a conference organised by Community Housing Cymru. Before going along to their workshop I tried one other thingy - posting a video of development manager Sioned Hughes, asking people to send ideas on using social media in organisations to the conference blog. That was a great success, as you can see here if you browse the comments. Thanks to Lloyd, Paul, Michele, Beth, DK, Paul, Simon, David, Jeremy, Menka, Nick, Paul, Tim, Ian.
Anyway, back to storytelling, of the digital kind. Louise Harris runs the Big Learning Company, and Christine Wilson works at the Centre for Research and Innovation in Care Services, University of Glamorgan. They recently contributed to the first Public Sector Narrative Conference: Storytelling for Change, which was a collaboration between Public Service Management Wales, ENLA and the Wales Centre for Health.

The essence of their workshop was that by videoing, picturing, podcasting or otherwise recording the experiences of service users and managers you can, with their agreement, use stories to promote change.
One story we heard was that of a nurse who was interrupted while dispensing drugs to a patient. She gave the wrong thing to the patient, and was so mortified she couldn't sleep that night. In the morning she offered to hand in her resignation: even though the patient was OK she felt it was a terrible lapse in professional practice. Fortunately her manager turned the incident to advantage, and encouraged the nurse to share her experience with the rest of the team on the ward. As a result they came up with a solution - a sash nurses could wear saying "do not disturb, dispensing".
Several things emerge from this story, for me. First, the ward manager recognised how it was possible to start off with a story and end up with a new procedure, re-assuring those involved along the way. Second, the manager is prepared to allow that story to be retold digitally - we saw the manager's story at the conference - and show others how change can happen. Thirdly, I could remember it. When was the last time you could recite a Powerpoint slide without notes?
I interviewed Louise and Christine at the end of the conference, and as I was doing so it occurred to me that storytelling techniques could be really useful for the Innovation Exchange in their quest to get nonprofit service providers, commissioners and investors working together. That where I was thinking about collaboration thingies the other day. I've dropped that possible connection into the interview and will post the idea across to John Craig and colleagues. Hah! - there's another collaboration thingy: blogging as brokerage.

While Louise was emphasising the Welsh talent for storytelling I remembered that my friend Lloyd Davis had been doing something last year with a Surrey Healthcare blog. There are some great videos with professionals, patients, and anyone else Lloyd and the team could engage. I'll pop along to the Social Media Cafe he organises every Friday in Soho over the Coach and Horses. If you want to come too, sign up here. Should be good stories and conversation, and I'm sure action will follow. It's up to you to provide the ending.
Update: over at content to be different Paul Caplan describes how he does a Conversation audit to provide "an in-depth qualitative analysis of how a business, product, service or brand is being talked about on the Live Web". I guess that's the way you can find where your story ends up.

I've been thinking I should blog more about Charles Leaderbeater's book We Think than the brief mention earlier. Now the Social Innovation Camp site offers a special contribution from Charles as a guest blogger. In the We-think spirit of build on other people's efforts, I feel free to quote his piece:

An idea is set in motion by being shared. The scope available to use for pooling, exchanging and developing ideas determines the extent of our innovation and creativity and so fundamentally our prosperity, well-being and hope for the future. Ideas grow by being articulated, tested, refined, borrowed, amended, adapted and extended, activities that can rarely take place entirely in the head of an individual; but which invariably they involve many people sharing different insights and criticisms. The web allows shared creativity of this kind to involve more people, discussing more questions from more angles with more ideas in play, at least it does as long as people organise themselves in the right way. We have only just started to explore how we could apply this collaborative, participative culture to social challenges.

The idea that sharing might become the economy’s motive force is deeply unsettling because it turns conventional wisdom on its head. From Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations written in 1749 through to Hernando de Soto’s recent The Mystery of Capital, economists have argued that private property provides the basis for capital, that is the elixir at the heart of capitalism, which propels its constant growth and renewal. But in an economy of ideas most of the animating capital is shared.

The web’s significance is that it makes sharing central to the dynamism of economies that have hitherto been built on private ownership.

That is why the new organisational models being generated by the web are so unsettling for traditional corporations created in an industrial model of private ownership. Traditionally organised and owned corporations are seeking to exploit a platform that animates ideas and markets by allowing sharing on an unprecedented scale.

That is why potentially the web reconnects us with a different story about the rise of the West: one that gives a central role to the way ideas are aired and shared rather than focussing on how land and buildings are locked down into property. Much of what we most value – in culture, language, art, science and learning – comes from a kind of gift exchange, in which ideas are passed from person to person, and accumulate over long periods.

As Lewis Hyde puts it in his history The Gift :

“When gifts circulate within a group their commerce leaves a series of interconnected relationships in its wake and a kind of decentralised cohesiveness emerges.”

The more we value activities that depend on the gift of ideas - science, culture, art, learning and innovation - the more we will need non-market institutions to support them. In the past, the church, monarchy, aristocracy and more recently, the state have supported these non-market activities of shared inquiry, expression and experimentation. We Think creates a new basis for the gift economy, in which thanks to decentralised and distributed technologies gifts of knowledge and ideas can circulate from and to many people. That circulation will sustain the mass, digital folk culture that will be the most powerful cultural force of the first decades of the century. Global public banks of knowledge, Wikipedia, the Encyclopedia of Life, the Human Genome, the outputs of the International Polar Year, the free content on The Sims all belong in part to this new commons.

That is why social innovation stemming from the web will be one of the most vital and most disruptive forces of the next few years, opening up the possibility that we could create entirely new ways to organise social endeavour.

The easiest way to explain mass open collaboration online - to people who may not be familiar with the idea - is to mention Wikipedia, "the free encyclopedia anyone can edit". I'm a big fan, and generally believe there's a lot of potential for extending collaborative editing to collaborative problem-solving.
As founder Jimbo Wales explains in this video, there's a complex system of governance behind the scenes including a "neutral point-of-view policy", and a core group of editors, so the whole thing operates as "a democracy with a bit of aristocracy and some monarchy thrown in".
The king is now involved in some personal controversy about privacy, neutrality and governance. The Register is running a story Jimbo Wales dumps lover on Wikipedia. It's about his relationship with Fox News pundit Rachel Marsden, how it ended, and how her Wikipedia bio was edited. Here's Jimbo Wales statement, and a report in Valleywag of texts about his possible influence.
I find it difficult to see any editorial wrong-doing from what's reported - however it does highlight the privacy and governance challenges of mass collaboration. It may add some buzz to the launch tonight of Charles Leadbeater's excellent book We-think, which works through the benefits and risks of an open approach:

We Think explores how the web is changing our world, creating a culture in which more people than ever can participate, share and collaborate, ideas and information.
Ideas take life when they are shared. That is why the web is such a potent platform for creativity and innovation.
It's also at the heart of why the web should be good for : democracy, by giving more people a voice and the ability to organise themselves; freedom, by giving more people the opportunity to be creative and equality, by allowing knowledge to be set free.
But sharing also brings with it dilemmas.
It leaves us more open to abuse and invasions of privacy.
Participation is not always a good thing: it can just create a cacophony.
Collaboration is sustained and reliable only under conditions which allow for self organisation.

You can down download the first three chapters here.The launch is in the form of a debate between Charles and Andrew Keen, who is promoting his own rather contrary view in his book The Cult of the Amateur. They will be discussing:

Will a new culture of mass collaboration lead to enhanced creativity and ultimately, to innovation, or are we simply providing a forum for the misuse of information and for the erosion of quality? Will a new culture of mass collaboration lead to enhanced creativity and ultimately, to innovation, or are we simply providing a forum for the misuse of information and for the erosion of quality?

It seems Andrew was talking to Jimbo only last week about the flaws he sees in Wikipedia. Hope we get a recap.
There' a neat summary from Roland Harwood on the NESTA Connect blog about success factors for mass collaboration for innovation, based on Wikipedia experience.
More later on the session Laura Whitehead, Nick Booth and I ran last week at the Circuit Riders conference, about social media. Title: Naked in a Goldfish Bowl. As Laura reports, it was substantially about Beth Kanter's success in personal fundraising. There are upsides.
Hat tip to Bill Thompson for tip via Twitter

Earlier this week John Craig and colleagues, who are developing the Third Sector Innovation Exchange, invited a bunch of us along to share ideas over wine and pizza on what it takes to make collaborations work. I ended up pondering on how "thingies" might help - of which more later.
The Innovation Exchange is being funded by the UK Government to "find new ways to connect innovators in the third sector with public service commissioners and other investors and help them to work together to develop their work".
What this means, as I understand it, is that the exchange wants to find social entrepreneurs, nonprofits and others with good ideas, and then support them in working with public bodies who might buy their products and services, and funders who could invest. At the same time they have to encourage organisations who may be conventional in procurement to be more adventurous. The first two areas of activity are supporting independent living and excluded young people.

The evening was a great opportunity to wish John and his team every success in a challenging task, pitch in some ideas and identify some challenges. We talked a lot around the need to mix together the processes of encouraging innovation with specific activities to find and support innovators. In order to do this the team are meeting a lot of people, developing a more sophisticated online system, and planning some events - just as a start.

I had plenty of questions - but thought other people's might be even more interesting, so I asked my friend Tim Davies to pick up my camera and do a little interviewing. He and John were happy to oblige. The change in colour balance is due to a flare up in the stove rather than any heat in the exchange.

I came away thinking that one thing John and colleagues might do, to aid their work and that of anyone else trying to promote innovation for social good, is to set up a "collaboration thingy exchange". This would be a space where we could all pitch in those "something or others" that if you do them, both help make things happen and create some ripples.
Offering people wine and pizza for the evening is definitely a well-tried thingy, because it gets you into conversational rather than document-writing mode, you strike up some new relationships, and get the feel of who you could work with. If you follow-up with blog items, calls or emails you find who is responsive. It's best to do these meet-ups regularly, and it doesn't require a fixed venue. For example, Jeremy Gould has followed up UKGovwebBarcamp with meetings in the House of Fraser coffee shop across the road from his Ministry office. Lloyd Davis has established the Social Media Tuttle Club each Friday in the Coach and Horses, Soho.
Larger-scale things on the same lines are Open Space events, Barcamps, Unconferences - all face-to-face spaces where people are encouraged to think creatively, strike up conversations, form and reform groups to take ideas forward.
Online spaces can - with more difficulty - fulfill a similar function. Simon and I opened up a multi-author blog system to develop, in the open, our failed bid for the Innovation Exchange. The new Innovation Exchange will have a much fancier system.
You can add more spice to events by designing them as games, as my colleague Drew Mackie and I have done over here. One idea I suggested to John was to run some simulations where innovators and purchasers "changed sides" so they understood each other rather better.
What doesn't succeed, in my experience, is expecting these tools to work without some facilitation. Are people thingies? If so, what's needed both online and face-to-face are collaboration co-ordinators, as Shawn Callahan calls them. The role of these co-ordinators - or whatever you may choose to call them - is:

ferreting out good collaboration practices and tools and keeping up-to-date with the field

finding situations in the organisation where better collaboration would make a difference to the quality of products and services, the speed of delivering these products and services to clients, and the ability to use a diversity of ideas and approaches to innovate

helping people learn and adopt collaboration practices and tools

collecting stories of how collaboration really works for the times you need to justify the role

connecting people and ideas so new collaborations might flourish

The blog where Shawn and colleagues talk about the work of their company in Australia is itself a terrific innovation and collaboration exchange - with generous sharing of the methods they use, as well as insights gathered from elsewhere....
... which brings me to the best thingy of all, which is to open up. I'm sure John and colleagues feel under some pressure to "deliver" ... when of course success depends pretty much on the actions and attitudes of others (and as Dave Pollard confirms, attitude is hugely important). What's needed, in my view, is a whole lot of processes and activities that encourage innovators, investors and public bodies to co-design the improved services that we needed ... which reminds me of another set of thingies prepared by Johnnie Moore and James Cherkoff as a manifesto for co-creation.
Anyway, my best suggestion to John is to share the challenge that the Innovation Exchange faces by inventing it in public, as Simon is doing with Ruralnetonline. Keep offering the wine and pizza, and blog as you go.
After the evening I asked John for any further thoughts. He replied:

The evening was fantastically helpful for me, if challenging, so many thanks to those who attended. If I were to pick out two features of the conversation, they would be diversity and scale.
On diversity, there were some strong challenges about how the Innovation Exchange can reach different people across the system. The chasm between the people who buy services and those who use them means getting citizens' views is vitally important. Equally, different kinds of people in different roles will respond to the Innovation Exchange in different ways, and we need to cater for all of them.
On scale, there was an important question about whether we want to be encouraging the third sector to be 'innovative' or to be supporting particular innovations to grow. The conversations encouraged me to be loud and proud about the fact that we are focusing on the latter - not preaching at people about innovation but providing practical support for innovators who need it.
I hope people will continue to engage with us and challenge us.

The UKGovwebBarcamp this weekend, at which civil servants who work on government web sites got together with consultants, contractors and freelances, could help start a round of creative small-scale collaborations to improve public online services.
The way the event came together sets the scene for how this may happen: it was a great example of how people can self-organise to create the topics they want to talk about, and then get together for a blend of presentations, round-tables and chats in the coffee area.
Jeremy Gould, who is head of Internet communications at the Ministry of Justice, put an enormous amount of work in to move things forward, starting last November. Anyone interested signed up to a wiki and a Google group for online discussion, and on Saturday morning turned up at Google HQ not knowing quite what would happen. That was deliberate, because the first task after a round of introductions (name, organisation and three tags/keywords) was to fill a whiteboard with sticky notes setting out the agenda in 20-30 minute slots. (photo below by Jason Cartright)
It worked on Saturday, partly because some of those attending knew it would, based on experience at other Barcamps. You just need some simple guidelines and confidence in people's ability to self-organise in the way they will at Open Space events.

I won't try and capture session discussions here, because others are doing that very well - particularly Dave Briggs. You can find other reports here because bloggers are tagging their posts UKGovwebBarcamp and Technorati indexes them all. You'll find a set of photos contributed by participants on Flickr. Relevant web sites are here, videos here on YouTube, and instant (Twitter) messages here.
You don't have to go to all these different places on the web because they are all pulled together in Pageflakes. If someone adds another blog post, photo, video about the event it is automatically fed in there through RSS feeds.
Just as people who, in many cases, hadn't met before were able to self-organise a terrific event on the day, so they we able during and afterwards to self-organise collaborative reporting. Well, with a bit of help from Dave Briggs who created the Pageflake.
The alternative approach to all of this would have been to hire an event organiser and designer, pay for the venue, commission a web site, print out programmes and signs, ask for Powerpoint presentations two weeks in advance, sit people down in rows .... you know the sort of thing. I don't go to them any more. Costly to organise, boring to attend.
Of course there are other ways to organise highly successful events with a mix of the planned and spontaneous. Preparation and structure is needed if you are looking for some specific outcomes. Open space events don't just happen: they require very skilled hosting. A well-designed and edited web site helps people find good stuff quickly.
As usual it is a matter of choosing the meetings and communications technology appropriate to your purpose.

Two things make me hopeful that further collaborations will follow:

First, the fact that people were able to put names to faces - as Jeremy Gould highlights in the video I shot near the end of the event. People who previously read a blog in their field with interest now feel they can call up and suggest meeting for a coffee. (That is, if they can access blogs. I gather many Government departments block civil servants from reading blog sites and other "frivolous" content. Good stuff coming out of UKGovwebBarcamp may help IT managers to relax the rules, at least for communications staff.)
Secondly, there were some specific proposals in one session for turning informal discussions into real problem-solving and development activities. One question asked from the government side was whether consultants would be prepared to go into government departments and join knowledge-sharing workshops without being paid, and without making a marketing pitch. Some of us nodded. If you are putting your ideas and experience into the public domain by blogging, it is a small step - and even more rewarding - to go and talk to someone who may be able to put it to use. You start a relationship, and learn more about the needs of that Government department. You can't by-pass the procurement processes on big jobs, of course, but you are better informed. You may get paid for the next workshop out of the training budget.
Jeremy has now emphasised the opportunities (and conditions) for collaboration on his blog:

We need to find ways to make partnership between those inside and those around government easier - and promote it as as an alternative method to trying to do everything ourselves. We don’t know all the answers individually, but as a collective we can get closer to the ideal solutions.
If we in government want to innovate more, we should also behave more like innovators. The format and style of the barcamp was great and encouraged collaboration and thinking differently. There are other types of gathering and ideas generation techniques that should consider trying - like mini-barcamps, open coffee meets, social media clubs, geek dinners etc. Anything that gets us all out of the day to day work environment is a good thing (probably).

He adds: "Question is, how do now we sustain the momentum generated on the day?"
No immediate answer, but my hunch is that a few people are working on it. Just keep checking in with the Pageflake.

A couple of workshops I ran recently reminded me that amidst enthusiasm for the opportunities for engagement and collaboration that social media can bring, organisational culture and systems are likely to be a strong inhibitors. The first hurdle may be language.
In both workshops I was working with groups to play through different versions of the social media games I have developed with Drew Mackie. In each case we started by inventing some possible situations - scenarios - where social media could be used for engagement or collaboration, and then went on to use packs of cards to choose a mix of tech and non-tech methods.
Members of one workshop were marketing and communications specialists working in the education field, and they wanted to think through (among other things) how "chip shop mums" could be persuaded to offer their children better diets; how people could be encouraged to challenge yob/hoodie culture (is there a better word?); how children being taught at school might enter the state system.
In each instance - as far as I could see - action would depend upon parents and citizens deciding to do things differently. They would probably be more persuaded by people they knew than by official exhortation. Not only would they need to engage with the issues, they would need to collaborate.
However, the seminar framework within which the workshop discussion was taking place was "identify your audiences, clarify your messages, choose your channels, set your targets, develop a plan".
The groups were choosing social media tools like MySpace, blogs, video, identifying possible champions to use them, but perhaps not realising at first that once you go down that path you can't control what happens. You have moved from the world of media megaphones to one where "The Audiences" are no longer the receivers of content; they are the producers.
Of course, that's always been the case in situations where people can chat to each other ... whether at the school gate or in the chip shop queue. Social media increases the reach, amplifies the organisation-instruction/personal-conversation gulf.
We talked a bit about that at the wrap-up of the session, and there were lots of nodding heads, so I'm sure, as they say, it will be taken on board. I must check in and see what future social media communication plans look like.
The other workshop was with tenants and leaseholders of a large housing organisation, where the community development staff were keen to explore how social media could help people not only get better services, but also participate in forums and other activities even if they were spread across south-east England.
We had great fun a their conference this weekend inventing situations that ranged from flooding putting out all centralised systems, to online advice systems and organising childcare. Groups then had no difficulty working out what might be done - because those in a group that weren't too sure what a blog or wiki was, got help from the others.
The director of IT joined in and added some bright ideas ... but over lunch was rather more circumspect. The problem was, he said, we would need to work out how to support and manage these new systems. There would need to be some control.
Of course, that was clearly the case when the new services had to be integrated with those already provided by the organisation. But these days there's nothing to stop a group of residents setting up their own communication systems using free or low-cost web services ... and I sensed that this might initially bring furrows to some brows.
The discussions that would then be necessary within the organisation - perhaps between community development staff and service providers - would probably be a replay of others over the years about how far people should be consulted, engaged, trusted.
Again, I think things will work out. As I was leaving, and chatting to staff organising the event, I raised this possible tension. "Oh don't worry about that", they said. "We don't hang about. We just set up our own wikis for collaboration, and get on with it".
While the two workshops reminded me of the control and culture issues raised by social media, they also confirmed that a good way to start dealing with them is to get together in groups and talk about it. Nice to have clients who recognise that ... which reminds me of another point.
In an exchange of emails after the first event my client contact said she thought that the game had been really useful, and she would be using it to help plan a communications network for a group of education institutions that really needed to collaborate more effectively. My first thought was, hey, how about involving me. But then I reminded myself that I had said the games were Creative Commons licensed and could be used and remixed if then put back into the public domain. That's the thing about social media stuff, once it's out there, you can't control it.
Report of an earlier workshop on using social media for engagement, and one on social media in housing.
If you are interested in an insider view of how the UK government is grappling with social media, you can do no better than read Whitehall Webby Jeremy Gould. He reports on how the Foreign Office is embracing Web 2.0 under Ministerial blogger David Miliband. That's the other lesson, of course. A bit of old-style leader is needed if you want to cut through the barriers ... and good to see that it will be more than him with the blog in future. You can find FCO blogs here..